Review: Pennisi, Giulia Adriana (2025). English for legal studies. Carocci

Abstract

Giulia Pennisi’s English for Legal Studies (2025) provides a clear state of the art of legal English by openly acknowledging that it requires specialized levels of expertise, consideration of interactions and sound working knowledge of differing contexts. This has represented a challenge for teachers and curriculum designers and led to traditional textbook structures that try to encompass the most immediate overall needs of teachers and students by focusing on the most standardized and general aspects and genres of legal English. The present textbook pushes against such an approach and adopts an innovative stance by purposefully inserting legal English into its diverse historical-geographical context and exploring the real communicative functions that are carried out by its unique lexico-grammatical forms. This enables teachers and learners to understand the effect that language has on the law and appreciate the ways in which linguistics can be used in legal academic research and practice.